I’m going to be honest. When I first picked up an advance copy of Andrew Sean Greer’s “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” I knew I wanted to like it, but was pessimistic if I could.

Given its overall premise and the few books and movies I automatically associated with it, I worried that it’d be nothing short of hokey.

I’m glad to say that Greer not only proved me wrong, but significantly so.

The book concerns itself with a woman named Greta, last name of Wells and living in 1985. When her lover, Nathan, grows increasingly distant and her gay twin brother, Felix, dies, she falls into a deep depression that no treatment of the mid-80’s can soothe.

She ultimately consents to electroconvulsive therapy, which is pretty much electroshock under a different name. Her doctor tells her the treatments will be twice a week for 12 weeks and warns her that she may experience hallucinations.

And so, with her second treatment on Halloween, she wakes up to find herself in 1918. Her last name is Michelson, she seems to be something of a lolling, lower-end aristocrat and she’s living near the end of WWI.

She’s also very, very aware that this isn’t her usual life.

Not entirely sure of what to do, she follows her precious Aunt Ruth — very similar to her Aunt Ruth from 1985 — to a Halloween party. There, she’s thrilled to see that Felix is alive, but finds out achingly fast that his homosexuality has been severely repressed; so much, in fact, that Greta can see that even he himself refuses to acknowledge it, although he nonetheless looks pained to be moving forward with his plans to marry a woman.

Greta also finds out that she’s now married to Nathan, but he’s off fighting in the war, much to the displeasure of Leo, the 1918 Greta’s younger sweetheart.

When she undergoes her next treatment — by the same doctor — she wakes up not back in 1985, but in 1941. She is again married to Nathan, but this time he’s home with her and they have a young son also named Felix, nicknamed Fee.

The twin-brother Felix is again alive and suppressed in his sexuality, reducing his lover from 1985 into nothing but an awkward, bittersweet bumbling of Cupid’s arrows in 1941. Greta feels forced to simply watch the two of them scramble to hide their feelings when all she wants to do is break the taboos that would finally allow them to be together and happy.

But to make matters worse, when Greta realizes her arm is in a cast, she finds out that she had recently been in a car accident with her beloved Aunt Ruth, who has died. Hence the 1941 Greta’s reasons to undergo electroconvulsive therapy.

Page 2 of 3 - And so Greta, with every new therapy session, flits about these three worlds in a rotation: 1918 with its repressing sexuality, absent husband and young lover on the side; 1941 with its addition of a son and the demise of her close aunt; and 1985 with its deserted lover and demise of her twin brother.

Since her sessions are every Thursday and Friday, her rotations also alternate between staying in a given world for one day or for a whole week.

I was impressed with several of Greer’s takes on this somewhat old tale: the detail and awareness of Felix’s repressed homosexuality within the 1918 and 1941 worlds, how his repression differed depending on the world and the 1985 Greta’s awareness of when WWI would end and viewing it all with the bittersweet knowledge that it wouldn’t be too long before WWII.

I was further intrigued with Greer’s concept of there being other Gretas. Because, of course, if the 1985 Greta wasn’t in one of these worlds at any given time, then somebody else was.

The fact that there are three Gretas undergoing the same therapy at the same time in their own worlds helps explain how they’re able to rotate amongst one another at all. It also creates an even deeper and more interesting story.

Simply, if one doesn’t undergo treatment at the same time as the others, then that parallel universe is cut off until that Greta begins treatment again. This means that the 1985 Greta has the power to stop her treatments at any time so she can stay in the world of her choosing, but this also means that the 1918 and 1941 Gretas can as well.

And as her Aunt Ruth hints in the two worlds she still lives in, each Greta seems a bit different from the others. All three of them are just as unpredictable as they are similar, which is a great way of pointing out that, yes, different life experiences really can create different personalities.

While the 1985 Greta is free to meddle in the lives of the other two, the other two are in turn free to meddle in our Greta’s 1985 life.

That’s the extent of the plot that I’ll give to you here. There’s plenty more where that came from and ultimately the book is nothing short of a quiet kind of wonderful. I don’t know how else to explain Greer’s gift for prose other than feeling like you’re slowly being submerged into a tub of warm water. I took to it easily and didn’t want to get out.

Greer was also quite good at making sure a reader didn’t get lost within all of this time-jumping and multiple identities of several characters.

Page 3 of 3 - And since I’m somebody who can get confused pretty easily with something like this, I really appreciated the extra care I felt he made. He wasn’t throwing something complicated at the reader to make him feel superior; rather, he wrote in a way that could help the reader, interestingly enough, feel like they could relate to the story.

And while he was so keen to keep a reader from getting lost, he was just as keen in misleading a reader to how the book would end. Every time I thought I had it figured out — again, I was still fearing some sort of hokeyness — Greer went ahead and thumped me on the head. Over and over and over. The man has a gift for enjoyable misdirection.

This is, in short, one of those rare books that not only inspires a library addict such as myself to actually buy a copy, but also shove it into the faces of any person I know who would actually allow me to do such a thing. And perhaps even a few that wouldn’t.

“The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells” debuted on June 25. So if you want something that feels pleasantly intricate and fantastically relatable, pick up a copy from your local library or, as I always prefer, Bestsellers Cafe.

— Milo Todd is an employee of Bestsellers Café, 24 High St., in Medford Square. He is a Medford resident.